GREEN BAY – Al Groh showed us all something yesterday in Green Bay. On a day when all eyes were fixed on Groh and his NFL head coaching debut as yet another hopeful successor to the legend of Bill Parcells, he responded.

Most of all, Groh’s response came in the way of the well-prepared and mentally-tough product he had on the field in the Jets’ stirring 20-16 win over the Packers at Lambeau Field.

When Groh told us a week ago that he believed this team was a “tough-minded” group that was going to be “tough to beat,” many of the cynics among us wondered aloud how he could know that without it having had to dodge a real bullet yet.

But after the bullets flew through the Midwest afternoon yesterday in the House That Lombardi Built in the form of Brett Favre passes and LeRoy Butler blitzes, Groh’s assessment of his team turned out to be pretty damned accurate.

In the last eight years, the Packers had lost only 10 of 69 games at Lambeau Field entering yesterday’s game. The Jets’ win yesterday dropped the Packers’ Lambeau record to 59-11 in the last eight-plus seasons.

Make no mistake, for Groh, yesterday was a proud moment. And although he refused to acknowledge his personal pride after the game, preferring to direct it toward his players, you can bet that Groh was beaming inside as a 56-year-old first-time NFL head coach.

“I was very resolute in my mind that I was going to remove my personal emotions from the game,” Groh said after the game. “I did that in my preparation and I did that during the course of the game. So I don’t really see it as a first game win for me so much as it was a good way for our team to start the season. My ego is really not such that this was about Al Groh at all.”

After his press conference, Groh acknowledged that “there is someone I think will be pretty emotional about this when I make a call.”

When asked if that person was Parcells, Groh said, “No. The blonde in my bedroom.”

That would be Anne Groh, who paced around their Long Island home during the game as much as she watched it on TV.

“It was nerve-wracking,” Anne Groh was saying by phone last night, hours after the game. “But Al tells me they’re all going to be like that.”

Anne Groh recalled that she used to suffer from migraine headaches on game days when Groh was the head coach at Wake Forest. As a long-time coach’s wife, though, Anne Groh knows the drill to the point that she’d become used to game days. Yesterday, however, elicited a very different emotion.

“It’s different because it is your husband’s team,” she was saying. “No matter what I’m reading in the newspapers, believe me, this is not Bill’s team. It’s Al’s team. I don’t know when people are going to figure that out.”

Anne Groh, saying, Parcells “is so supportive of Al and truly wants him to succeed”, compared him to a father sending his child to college.

Yesterday, indeed, went a long way toward helping people figure out this is Groh’s team. It went a long way toward bringing Groh’s players closer to him, because many of them went into the game wondering how he was going to respond under fire.On the bus ride from the stadium to the airport, where the Jets would board their charter flight home, Groh called his wife at home and she could hear the excitement in his voice.

“He was obviously happy,” she said. “It was a big game. It’s not like playing Appalachian State. This was the Green Bay Packers on the road in the first game of the year.”

The first game of a new career.

Anne Groh said her husband beamed most in their conversation about how tough the team stayed in the face of a number of adversities.

“What they showed was they were mentally tough,” she said. “That’s what he’s been preaching all summer long.”